I could see a compromise where if there are obscure codecs that may not be as secure, FFmpeg would present a warning before loading the file. This way, the user would have the option to decide whether to load the file or not. By default, potentially malicious files would not be loaded, which could prevent them from being used as part of an exploit. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
> FFmpeg would present a warning
Reminds me of gstreamer plugins being separated in "base", "good", "bad" and "ugly" sets.